Skype issued a press release 8 July: 130 million downloads, 30 million more since April. Is this news? Many (most?) must be upgrades. Better for Skype to report more meaningful numbers:

• number of accounts,
• number of SkypeIn numbers,
• number of SkypeOut calls made,
• number of SkypeOut minutes served (total and per capita),
• number of affiliate sales,
• frequency distribution of languages people choose in their profiles,
• moving averages and peaks of simultaneous users online or in calls,
• number of text conversations.

These measures suggest the health of the Skype community, the use of Skypenet, the revenue of Skype Technologies.

30 million downloads in 45 days may be newsworthy, but explain it better. Were they from some countries more than others? How many were referred by Skype's new portal partners and which ones? What proportion were upgrades by users wanting some of the new features which came out in versions 1.2 and 1.3?

And how about some context? Are 130 million and 30 million downloads big numbers? WinZip 9.0 was downloaded 146 million times. 30 million is a little bigger than the population of Iraq, a little smaller than the population of Canada. Australians buy 130 million books a year, 130 million Chinese take the train, and American hunters kill 130 million animals. Is 400,000 a day a lot? Download.com reported the new WinZip 9.0 was downloaded 380,213 times in one week.

This news release's real significance is (a) that 130 million is the highest possible number of Skype users if everyone downloads just once and (b) someone will take more than five minutes (the time it takes to shine a pair of shoes) to write the next one.